


bloody yesterday

by Dorkangel



Series: little and broken and still good [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: (Referenced) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Gangsters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Backstory, Canon-Typical sexual violence, Character Study, Child Neglect, Dad max, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gang Violence, Gangs, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Max doesn't talk much, Non-Explicit, Non-consensual prostitution, Nothing explicit, Sad with a Happy Ending, Team as Family, Toast is angry, Vuvalini, War Boys, or the threat of it at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-05 23:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4199331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one's parents are cruel enough to name a child 'Toast', not even hers. It doesn't matter anyway though, because she hasn't seen them since she was five.<br/>Look, Toast can take care of herself. She doesn't need anyone and she doesn't care about anyone. But all the bad stuff is piling up and up and she can't run any more, she's just a fucking kid, and somehow she ends up trying to rob an amputee in an alley-<br/>In retrospect, it was a bad idea. But, hey, worse things have come of theft than an awkward policeman who thinks he's everyone's dad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bloody yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> References to non-consensual prostitution and extremely bad parenting by everyone other than Furiosa and Max.
> 
> *
> 
> Also!! I am super enthusiastic about this AU, so if anyone wants to request a character (space hardware was about Nux, this one's about Toast) for me to do another one of these on, please don't be shy about it!

 

 

No one's parents are cruel enough to name a child 'Toast'. Not even hers. She's never seen her birth certificate, but she knows for a fact that her name isn't really Toast.  
There's a vague memory in her mind of sitting on the step of her family's trailer, the world a dustbowl and nothing more because that was all she knew, and some policeman crouching down in front of her and asking her name.  
She scowled and didn't answer.  
"We heard that there was a Mary out here all on her own." he had said, pulling his sunglasses off his nose to look over her properly. "Is that right?"  
(So maybe her name is Mary.)  
"M'not Mary." she muttered back, and got up to kick a stone absently.  
(So maybe it's not.)  
"Well," the cop continued, about as convinced by her posturing as she was by his faux friendliness. "If you're still alone in a couple of hours, I want you to call this number, okay?"  
Toast may have been young, but she knew how things worked, so she nodded to make him go away and he went.  
But she hadn't seen her mom in days, and her dad had locked her out of the trailer.  
When it got dark, she went to the broken payphone in the corner and dialled the number. 9-1-1 - she was only small, and she couldn't remember ever really being out of the trailer park but, fuck, she should have known what those numbers were.  
When Toast gets bitter, she sometimes thinks back to that moment and screams into a pillow. It's so goddamn frustrating that she can't go back and grab five-year-old Toast's hand and just tell her _no, don't do that. Just stick around here, ask one of the other families to help you. Stick it out on your own like you're gonna end up doing anyway, 'cos telling the authorities isn't gonna turn out any good for you, kiddo._  
Really, though, honestly, Toast knows that she didn't have any other choice. How would she have lived if five-year-old her hadn't dialled 9-1-1? She wouldn't have. She would have died of hypothermia in the night, or starved.  
They took her out of the dustbowl in a station wagon, wrapped her in a blanket that she didn't want, smothered her in platitudes and reassurances that she didn't want either, and provided her with beef jerky and a sandwich, which she did.  
And then there was the- well, it seems archaic to call it an orphanage. Toast can't think of it in any other way, though; there was a constantly exhausted woman whose only job was to make sure that they had clothes and food and everyone went to school at least three days a week and nobody died, and there were far, far too many kids, all of them under ten.  
Toast got her name on what must have been her second or third day there, having bitten a doctor who pronounced her malnourished, screamed at the poor woman in charge that no she would _not_ wash, and been moved off the sofa and into a room with an older girl who was, if possible, even angrier than she was.  
"Touch my stuff," warned the kid, who had grabbed her by the shirt the moment they were alone and pulled her forward. "And you're _toast_ , got it?"  
"I'm toast." she agreed nervously. "I get it."  
Apparently her authority complex had manifested itself far earlier than she would presumed, because she did end up touching her stuff, just to see what exactly being 'toast' meant.  
It meant being bodily thrown down the stairs and told not to come back to the room.  
Instead of risking that wrath again, she curled up under the kitchen table and tried to make herself small, hard to notice. It worked for a couple of hours, and then a boy had seen her and asked why she was there.  
Toast had glowered, and then surrender the information grudgingly.  
"I'm Toast."  
"What's there, Lee?" another kid had called, and the boy who found her frowned back.  
"There's a new girl here. Says her name is Toast."  
And it stuck.  
Her name gets her funny looks, but her eyes silence any questions. They warn people not to, her eyes, with the kind of angry, fragile patience that says _you have a choice: stay silent or get stabbed_. She doesn't know if she got that from her chronically absent mother and her alcoholic father or from the group home and surviving the other kids there, and she doesn't care. It keeps her safe.  
Her brooding stoicism was definitely already around when she was ten. Toast only knows that because that was when she outgrew the group home and got unloaded on the first do-gooder who volunteered himself as a foster carer for her. His name is Corpus Colossus.  
"See you got a lot of books there." he nodded, towards her bag, and failed to shut up when she shifted it behind her back and glared at him.  
"You like to read, then?"  
The truth is that it isn't the reading Toast enjoys. It's not even learning. She likes _knowing things_. At school she was considered like a teacher, but on the side of the kids, a mediator of fights and a repository of times tables and correct spellings. Toast has never been further than fifty miles out of the Citadel in her life, but she speaks seven languages. She's only small, but being knowledgable like that makes her valuable, powerful.  
And as for the kids who laughed at her and spent their time playing cards or ball games in the street while she read- well, which one of them can dismantle a gun in under thirty seconds?  
(She's careful not to do too well in her classes, to stay moodily silent and dangerous-looking so the teachers don't expect anything from her.)  
Corpus is a little guy too, but in a different way to her. He's under four foot and he walks with a cane, born with his bones all weird. Toast hates his guts, for numerous reasons mostly along the lines of 'he claims disability payments and the money he gets from letting some brat live in his house, and then doesn't feed said brat, forcing her to learn to steal food', but Corpus understands _scientia potentia est_ , the same as her. Knowledge is power.  
He sells information, usually to the gangs, and Toast gets familiar with quietly watching and listening while they talk. Corpus knows she's doing it but he doesn't stop her, and she's grateful enough for that. They have something of an understanding.  
She only realises that she's nearly sixteen a day before her birthday, and her mind reels.  
_I've gotten used to this_ , she realises, and it's sickening. _It doesn't bother me anymore_. She hates Corpus. Corpus hates her. They have screaming matches at least once a week, which usually end with him threatening to throw her out on her ass and her threatening to tell the police or child services exactly what he does for a living.  
They both have weapons and the ability to use them, but neither of them shoot each other. The fact that he never mentions the pistol she stole and stole and saved up for is one of his few redeeming qualities, undone by the way he calls her 'trailer trash' and swears that he's going to hand her over to the gangs one day.  
Toast is nearly sixteen, and she's not blind. She's hot. Especially if she smiles, which makes it lucky that she practically never does. She's not deaf either, she's heard Corpus talking to the War Boys, and she knows that they trade in... that, sometimes.  
It's the day before her birthday, and she makes a split second decision. Toast hasn't studied and stolen and learned to defend herself and survived all these years with Corpus to end up sold to some gang member against her consent.  
So she waits until he's asleep and tip-toes to the grubby bathroom with a razor blade, her heart pounding and her mouth dry with nerves. She's packed all the stuff she'll need - her gun, all the clothes she wears, a few books, every last bit of money she's ever saved and every piece of food in the house, and she doesn't have a phone but she has a pair of headphones to make it look as though a) she does and b) she's unobtrusive and not someone to be noticed - and she doesn't honestly care about anything else here.  
That's Toast's defence against this world. That apathy. She doesn't care at all, about anyone, about anything, just herself. She scowls and swears and yells and doesn't care.  
Toast hasn't cut her hair for more than a decade. It was pretty short when she lived in the trailer park, but it's been growing ever since then and it's at her waist.  
Corpus said last week that he thought it was pretty, that it could sell. He phrased it like he meant she could give it to a wigmaker, but she heard the subtext all the same. Sixteen is the age of consent here. If she does end up working for the War Boys, they could make her say she wanted to and the police couldn't do anything.  
She got a book on cutting hair out of the library and left it out where he could see it, just to piss him off. She hadn't really meant it.  
Toast snarls at her reflection in the mirror and raises the razor.

*

The next morning doesn't come with any singing of 'happy birthday' or presents or cake. Corpus gives her thirty dollars every Christmas, like the miserable bastard he is, and she gets her revenge via crappy gifts by shoplifting a two dollar pair of socks for him. Toast hasn't celebrated a birthday in six years.  
By the time he arrives at the breakfast table, she's missed the school bus, missed her opportunity to walk, and missed the bell. Her attendance record is pretty much perfect, but it's going to be Corpus's problem when the school calls him to ask him where she is, not hers, and she really doesn't care.  
She's sitting calmly at the breakfast table with her gun on her bag and her hand on the handle.  
He sees her, starts violently, and stares in utter confusion and shock.  
"What the hell?" he eventually growls, after she says nothing for a few minutes.  
"I'm leaving." Her jaw jumps slightly as she swallows with nerves, but other than that her face remains impassive. Toast is good at keeping a poker face. She's also good at poker, incidentally. She counts cards.  
"No you're- you're _not_." he splutters, not taking his buggish eyes off her. "You're too young."  
"I'm sixteen." she says, angry that he wouldn't even remember that when it matters so much. "And I'm leaving."  
He pauses for a moment, shakes his head in disbelief, and turns away.  
"Go then, Jesus fucking-"  
Toast grabs her bag and throws it over her shoulder, keeps her gun in her hand until she's off the property, and doesn't look back. Not once.

*

She runs out of bullets four months later, and it's only because of that that she stops to measure the time she's been gone.  
Leaving wasn't a mistake. Cutting herself loose of someone like Corpus could never be a mistake.  
But she's alone, and she's lost, and the Citadel only has one nice neighbourhood. Suffice to say that Toast isn't _in_ the nice neighbourhood. And to get to it, she'd have to go through War Boy territory, and there are so many reasons not to do that.  
No.1 - The War Boys are insane.  
No. 2 - Corpus works for the War Boys.  
No. 3 - The War Boys have a sideline in prostitution.  
No. 4 - Immortan Joe has a reputation for forcing girls into prostitution, twinned with his reputation for unnecessary violence and crazy car chases.  
She's slept in a library, a hospital, the spare room of an old woman who she had chatted with coarsely in Portuguese, a homeless shelter, locked in a public bathroom, a youth hostel, a church, the upstairs of a barman who had guessed at her situation, and a shopping mall doorway.  
She's shot at two guys who cat called her in the first week, - she was jumpy, okay? It's not like she hit them - some douche who offered her a drink she _knew_ was roofied, a dumbass mugger, a group of drunks who had been sneering and aggressive and armed, a Bullet Farmer who had gotten all up in her face, and a policeman that she panicked at. He was the only one she hit, and it was only in the shoulder.  
Toast manages not to care. She had turned and fled, initially, and hid behind a train station, her hand pressed over her mouth to stifle sobs of horror. But she's read about Pavolv and conditioning and even hypnotherapy and she just waits for the apathy she's trained into herself to kick in.  
Toast just doesn't care. It's simple, really. The person who got hurt, they weren't her, so it doesn't matter. The only emotion that she allows herself, that she really has under control, is anger, which is good really, because it means that people see her and avert their eyes from her own furious ones.  
But she has no bullets, so she's all but defenceless. Toast doesn't bother lying to herself about that, because she knows how to punch and she knows how to kick and bite and block - both from reading painstakingly about it in her books, and from practical experience - but that doesn't make up for the fact that she's five foot two on a good day and not particularly coordinated or muscled.  
_I have to get to the Green Place_ , she thinks, and then catches herself and blinks in surprise. Why the Green Place? It's safe and all, but she doesn't want to go through War Boy land. She's gone over this already.  
_What else am I going to do, though? she wonders. Go numb to life again, like every other time? Keep on living off the streets until I get arrested and go to prison?_  
Toast shoulders her bag again, plugs in her phone-less headphones, and starts marching towards the Green Place. Nowhere else to go, after all. She might as well try.  
She has absolutely no idea what she'll do once she's there, but. Well. Maybe surviving'll be easier. She could get a real job.

*

"Smile!"  
The shout is almost cheerful in its mockingness, and she just scowls harder and walks faster. Toast is wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of ripped old jeans that she 'borrowed' from a store a long time ago, nothing revealing or provocative, but she knows exactly how many females of the species are dumb enough to hang out with War Boys. If it's got boobs, they don't really distinguish.  
"Hey," the voice barks again. "I said _smile_."  
It's vaguely threatening, and she's not stupid, so she turns on her heel and flashes a quick grin. The source of the aggression is a big guy, easily more than a foot taller than her, with muscles that scream comicbook hero (or villain) on steroids and a blank-looking face.  
He looks delighted, unfortunately, and jogs up to keep pace with her.  
The only reason she hasn't reached for her pocket knife yet is that he's dressed as a pretty high-up War Boy. She wishes quietly that she had any bullets left.  
"You like nice when you smile." he grunts, and Toast forces herself to nod amicably and not reply.  
"It's my name." he continues. "Rictus, it means 'smile'. That's why I tells people to smile."  
_Rictus_ , she thinks. _Noun. A fixed grimace or repulsive grin_.  
"It suits you." she tells him, unable to resist the urge to be sarcastic and bratty.  
"Thank you!" Rictus beams back.  
"Would you leave me alone?" asks Toast, disguising her fear and disgust with a sweet tone.  
He literally, honest-to-god _pouts_.  
Toast is smart. She remembers stuff, more than other people do. She listens carefully to other people's conversations, and people think she's stupid because of the way she glowers and stays silent, so they don't stop her.  
And a sudden fact occurs to her as she walks and tries to think of a way to get rid of Rictus.  
"Hey, do you have a brother called Corpus?"  
"My little big brother." Rictus nods dopily.  
Toast sneers inwardly that she can see who got the brains of the family and who got the brawn.  
"Aw, I used to live with him." she babbles, all bubbly fake smile and relaxed body language. "Could I just stay a night with you? It's taking me longer than I thought to get where I'm going."  
"Uh, yeah."  
Rictus is dumb, enough so that Toast is pretty sure she can skirt her way around him, and then leave early on in the morning before the War Boys recover from last night's chrome hangover.  
"What's your name?" he asks, jaw hanging slack between words.  
"Toast."  
She leaves it at that, but he laughs and doesn't stop laughing all the way back to his flat. It's a nice flat, carelessly expensive, but she ignores all that in favour of locking herself in the spare room and gruffly declining any offers of food or drink or entertainment.  
Considering that she feels about as safe here as a gerbil in a snake tank, it's ironic that she has the best night's sleep since she can remember in the soft bed, curled up into a defensive, angry little ball and with one hand clutching her knife under the pillow.

Toast knows for a fact that the universe likes to screw her over. She knows that there are all kind of terms for it, too, and quotes: 'Sod's law', that's the first that comes to mind.  
It's also one of those things that people are always proving to be true for her. So when she wakes up to the sound of Rictus on the phone, the first thing that she does is brace herself and listen carefully.  
"...name's Toast," he's saying slowly. "She knows Corpus."  
Her heart starts up a thudding staccato, adrenaline pumping through her veins as every last instinct she's ever honed screams for her to run, _now_.  
"No, no," Rictus continues, as Toast frantically throws all her stuff into her bag and grabs a thin scarf to cover her head, as a disguise. There's a good amount of flesh showing through her jeans, so if anyone glances twice they're not really going to think she's Muslim, or not strict, at least, but it'll serve her purpose. "She's only small, I can grab her."  
Toast freezes, turns towards the door, and flicks open the pocket knife. Rictus might not be talking about what she's so afraid of, but she doesn't fancy her chances. There's no way she's going to allow herself to end up like that.  
She pulls the bolt across so that when he tries the door it comes open too quickly, and knees him suddenly in the gut. Rictus is a big guy, but he's not expecting that and he goes down heavily, gasping and clawing at her ankle as she darts past him.  
Toast doesn't care that he's hurt. He deserves it anyway, and how the fuck could she be so stupid enough to try that? She just literally threw herself into a den of wolves in the vain hope that one of them would be stupid enough to not see her as a slab of meat.  
Toast's feet thud heavily against the ground as she runs, and she doesn't allow herself to stop until her lungs are burning.

The War Boys are looking for her, she knows it. Maybe if she hadn't injured Rictus they'd forget about her, but they're riled up now and out for blood on their cars. Two to a car, the War Boys, one driving, one with a big fuck-off machine gun on the back. It's scary as all hell.  
Toast is angry at herself for letting that happen, absolutely raging, and increasingly infuriated that her mind has the temerity to be frightened at a time like this. How _dare_ she?  
She's in a kind of angry state of panic that means she doesn't even notice when there starts to be grass by the side of the road instead of tumbleweed, or when the grass starts to be green instead of yellow and dead.  
Maybe the War Boys have stopped following her, maybe her heart is just beating so loudly that she can't hear them anymore, she doesn't know.  
Toast doesn't even realise her knife is still in her hand and open until she slams into an old woman.  
"Watch where you're waving that about!" chides the woman, surprising Toast so much that she stumbles back and nearly lands on her ass.  
"God," she continues to herself, walking past the stunned girl like knife-wielding teenagers are a daily occurrence which, in this city, is actually quite possible. "New recruits these days. I didn't fight for this sanctuary just to get accidentally stabbed by someone throwing their arms out too wide."  
_The Vuvalini_ , Toast realises, the understanding like a hard punch in the throat. _I just threatened one of the Vuvalini._  
_I'm in the Green Place._  
Kneeling a War Boy leader in the stomach might be basically a death certificate, sure, but bringing a weapon into the Green Place...  
Toast presses herself into the wall and screws her eyes shut, trying desperately not to hyperventilate. The police are actually an authority here, and it's broad daylight, so she doesn't think anyone's going to just shoot her in the street.  
No one forgets what the Old Days were like, though, or what the Vuvalini do for the Citadel. If they _do_ shoot her, they're not even going to get a fine.  
"She wasn't mad," Toast murmurs to herself, trying to claw back her usual apathy from what ever kind of terror this is. "She's not coming after me."  
The shops around here have security cameras in them, more's the pity, and Toast doesn't have any money for food. She'll have to grab someone's wallet or something, and then tomorrow, definitely tomorrow, she can go looking for a proper job.  
(She isn't even sure that she believes that.)

*

If there's one thing that people like Corpus taught her, it's that a physical disability isn't an indicator of any lack of menace. The War Boys themselves are a testament to that, living wrecks that they are and basically delighted to injure themselves, and as a pack they operate more dangerously than any other gang.  
Which is why Toast shouldn't have been fucking stupid enough to see a woman with a prosthetic arm and let her ridiculous fucking crappy brain think _oh, she'll be an easy mark_.  
Of all the places she thought she'd be in the Green Place, in a chokehold with her weapons far away on the floor and her eyes swimming from lack of oxygen was not one of them.  
The arms around her are like steel, and whoever's holding her doesn't budge even when Toast kicks desperately at her kneecaps.  
One last gasp that does nothing to bring air into her screaming lungs.  
Darkness.

When she comes to, she's in the back of a police car with a blanket draped over her, and the situation is all too jarringly reminiscent of her memory of her first day in this vicious criminal whirlpool of a city. Toast jerks out of it and braces herself against the seat...  
There's nothing she needs to jump from. She's alone, and the car isn't moving. Outside there's a man and a woman, her standing with her head on his shoulder, him with an arm over hers like he doesn't know how to react to human comfort.  
"Furiosa," he says, slowly. "You can't just-"  
"I know. I panicked."  
Toast tries the door, forcing herself not to care about the strangers outside, and finds it locked. Great. She's trapped in here. She's probably going to prison. Fuck this.  
"She's awake."  
It's the man's voice, the policeman, rough from disuse and, and Toast feels her stomach sink. Helplessly, she brings her knees up to cross them beneath her, like a hedgehog protectively rolling itself up into a ball, and retreats back to the one setting she knows, scowling at her knees with her brows furrowed.  
"Sorry for grabbing you." calls the woman, grudgingly - Toast knows when someone's saying something just to satisfy an authority and, uh, yeah, there's a police officer there.  
"Fuck you." she shoots back, real mature but definitely satisfying.  
"Don't touch my stuff." the woman barks, and is nudged out of the way by the man.  
He just pauses a moment, frowning thoughtfully, and then says: "You're not under arrest."  
"Then what the fuck is this, shit-show?" Toast gestures around her as she says it, but the thing is that the guy is looking neither at her stormy face or her expressive hands, and it would be pervy for him to be looking at her body expect that he's just noting the way her shoulders are hunched and looking concerned. Toast can see him doing it, and it pisses her off. She doesn't need pity. She's gotten this far without it.  
"You could be under arrest." he offers, almost as a compromise. "If you wanted."  
"No thanks." She subsides a little, and then sighs. "What are you going to do?"  
"Talk." he grunts, pleased with himself. The woman takes his place.  
She's matter-of-fact, hard and wary in the face of someone unfamiliar, and Toast can appreciate that. When the woman talks, it's quick and sharp and without embellishments.  
"My name is Furiosa, I'm a member of the Vuvalini." Toast's blood runs cold, but the woman, Furiosa, doesn't seem to notice. "His name is Officer Rockatansky to you, but call him Fool, everyone else does. Here's the thing, kid. I know everyone, and he knows everyone else, but neither of us have ever met you and quite frankly I'm curious about why some tiny little teen would be trying to rob me."  
"Look," Toast reasons, more than a little irked at what sounds like patronising. "I won't come back, okay? I haven't been here before. Just let me go and I won't come back."  
Furiosa and Officer Rockatansky - Toast is very good at remembering names and faces, and she's hardly going to forget these two, is she? - exchange a look. It's more of a silent conversation, or at least an agreement, and she wonders if either of them ever say anything when they're alone.  
"We're not telling you to get out." Furiosa's the one eyeing her funny now, and Toast kind of wants to scream _I don't need your help_. "Just curious."  
"Yeah, well-"  
"I run a battered women's shelter." Toast almost visibly blanches at the words; they're so sudden and seemingly random.  
"I'm not a-" Not really. Kind of. Under the threat of.  
"I can see that." agrees Furiosa obligingly, like she knows something's up. "But you clearly haven't got anywhere else to go. Just for a night."  
Just for a night. There's a kind of awful symmetry to it, like someone Up There didn't think Toast had been quiet screwed over enough last time she tried staying with someone _just for a night_ , and decided they'd have another shot at it.  
Conditioned behaviour. Reflex arcs. Toast knows why her instincts want her to run - she knows a lot of things - and she knows that listening to them have kept her alive so far.  
But just, just for once, she ignores everything she's learnt and lets the angry apathy drop away.  
"Ok." she croaks.  
"Yeah?"  
"Yeah."  
Furiosa smiles grudgingly and reaches forward with her biological hand to open the door, then frowns.  
"It's locked." she says to Rockatansky, and his brow furrows somehow even deeper than it was before, his eyes turning into pools of liquid confusion.  
"It is?"  
Toast laughs before she can stop herself, and the two adults blink. Hysterical, ridiculous tears are pricking in her eyes and she just can't get her fucking act together because somehow they managed to accidentally stop her from running off. It's so dumb.

"I don't make a habit of this."  
"Hm?"  
Max - that's Rockatansky's name, apparently - glances at her, raising an eyebrow. Furiosa let her sit in the front, which honestly Toast didn't expect, and Max has the kind of puppy expression that makes her want to make up for anything bad she's ever done. She wants him to know that she's not like this, really.  
"Getting stuck in police cars."  
"Oh."  
He looks curious, and Furiosa, in the background, is quiet, so she continues.  
"My, uh. My name is Toast."  
That gets her a surprised blink, but no outright questions, so she, very quietly, describes the last time she was in a cop car.  
And then goes back, before that, tells him about the trailer park.  
And the group home.  
And Corpus, and everything he had said to her.  
And then the streets and Rictus and the old Vuvalini woman and everything that's happened.  
He stays quiet, but the way he looks at her softens.

*

"It's just my flat." Furiosa explains gruffly. "It's not much."  
Toast doesn't care. They could take her to some dump with cockroaches in the food and she wouldn't complain. (There was a rat on the bed, once, at Corpus's. She bought arsenic and rat traps after that, but Corpus wouldn't let her put then out.)  
"The two girls," Max continues, and it almost sounds _more_ hesitant when he speaks. "They're out. I think shopping."  
Toast is trying not to concentrate, but there's a photo on the fridge of two young women, one with red hair and one with blonde, with ice creams and huge, silly grins. There's photos of Max and Furiosa too, only he manages to consistently look surprised to have a camera in his face and she's far more guarded.  
"They look happy." she offers, since some kind of comment seems to be expected of her. It's not a lie. They do.  
Max cracks a reluctant smile at her before he collapses on the couch, ignoring as Furiosa ruffles his hair fondly on her way past. They're relaxed around each other in a very physical way, like he doesn't even notice the way that she's always touching him and vice versa.  
"Capable and Angharad." he grunts.  
"What?"  
"Their names."  
Oh. Ok. _Angharad:_ Toast doesn't speak Welsh, but she knows name meanings. 'Much loved'.  
If she's hiding in a somewhat-secret battered women's sheltered, how loved can she have been?  
"How long have they been here?" Toast asks carefully as she joins him on the couch. Max doesn't make any attempt to touch her, which she is all too grateful for.  
"Capable," he begins gradually. "Maybe six months. Angharad - two years."  
That's a long time. Like, a really long time. She isn't sure whether that scares her or it comforts her.  
"What d'you wanna watch?"  
Max's voice has gone back to semi-coherent mumbling, so she endeavours to stop thinking and glances at the Netflix guide he's frowning at.  
"Die Hard." He grunts a negative and keeps scrolling, and she fixes him with a scowl. "Why not?"  
"No shoot-'em-ups. Too much like real life. Only tacky."  
"Hell of a life."  
"Eh."  
She's joking, but she gets it. 'Sin City' isn't exactly calling to her, after all.  
He selects what looks like a rom-com, with an almost physically painful amount of pink on the cover, and this is his house and all, but Toast is _not_ standing for that.  
"Nuh uh. No."  
"What?" He's teasing, and she only hesitates a second before she elbows him for it, her shyness hidden behind a stormy smirk.  
"Find something your Angharad likes."  
Max's smile shrinks slightly, and she thinks for a moment that maybe she's overstepped some boundary, but he obediently searches out some old-looking thing in black and white and the shadow of a giant rabbit on the cover. She can't see any reason to protest, so she settles in to watch.

By the time the movie has descended into the kind of fictional depths where characters begin to question their sanity, Toast has relaxed and allowed herself to stop thinking. Other, Max speaking wouldn't startle her so much.  
"It's a good name."  
"What?" she jumps.  
It doesn't even strike her for a moment that he might be talking about her.  
"Toast." He nudges her shoulder slightly with his. "It's a good name."  
Toast grins, bright and sharp, and after that there's no need to speak at all.

*

Capable is only fifteen, and Toast makes sure Max sees her half-smile at how easy and expressive and loud she is, because unless the kid is an amazing actress, that's not how abused kids act around people they don't know. Being the _genius_ that she is, she doesn't even pick up on how Angharad is deliberating sheltering her for several weeks. Furiosa is far more obvious about it, after all. She hides guns all over the apartment; some in plain sight and all, but others... not. (Toast went looking for a bagel one morning, and was only somewhat surprised to find three pistols in the bread bin.)  
Max is just Max. _Dad_. They don't call him that, but it's true. He wears a ring, and he and Furiosa aren't married, and she doesn't ask but she can assume that once upon a time there was a child who was actually, biologically his. It's the only logical way to explain him.

No one's parents are cruel enough to name a child 'Toast'. Not even hers, and it's hard, letting all that apathy go after it kept her safe, coming out of a shell so rigid that she barely even knew the extent of it, but Toast cares more and more these days. She's less angry too, even if cushions do sometimes get thrown about and screaming happens.  
And yet she somehow doesn't give a flying fuck about her crappy parents anymore.  
Her new family is weird as all hell, sure, but it's a thousand times better.

**Author's Note:**

> This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(film) is the film. It's pretty goddamn cool, and I think Angharad would like it because it's all about human nature. And it's funny.
> 
> *
> 
> Also!! I am super enthusiastic about this AU, so if anyone wants to request a character (space hardware was about Nux, this one's about Toast) for me to do another one of these on, please don't be shy about it!
> 
> *
> 
> Title is from the same song as last time.


End file.
